The Seven Shelters of the Sinner
by Jayne Foyer
Summary: Insanity. Blindness. Silence. Fury. Denial. Obsession. Lies.
1. Insanity

_i. Insanity_

I take a moment as I dip a blade into her chest, and blood begins to ooze down the sides of her torso. I admire the way it leaves trails of crimson red on her young, pale skin. I lean forward, over her body, and gently drag a finger down her face. So beautiful. Such youth. Why must the good die young?

I insert my fingers into the incision. My hand. It is a glorious feeling to touch the insides of a human being. I marvel in it. How many people in the world can say that they have clenched their hand into a fist inside the body of another human? Very few alive on the earth today. How many, over the course of human history? I take my hand out of her body; it is covered in blood and strings of flesh hang from my fingernails. I imagine compiling such a list, signing my name in blood on the bottom of the page. I extend my fingers, spreading them like the legs of some gigantic, deformed spider. I trace the letters onto her skin.

_B._

_ B._

There you go, L. A confession.

But you already know, don't you. You already know who is killing. It's me, it's B, it's the child who was meant to turn out as your copy. It's you. That's what I am. I'm you. If I wasn't you when we met, I have become you since. I am L, and I am a killer. But we already knew you were a killer. _Kya ha ha ha!_ How else would A have died!

It is only then that I realize my hands are smearing blood across my face. I don't remove my hands right away. My fingers trail across my chin, my lips, rubbing the thick liquid into the inside of my mouth. My teeth. Painting on my cheeks and nose, like a child, and then I close my eyes as I paint my eyelids, like makeup on the whorish women in the streets of Los Angeles.

Los Angeles. Oh, I love Los Angeles. The City of Angels. So full of drugs and prostitutes and an underground, thriving community of rats, thieves and criminals. I don't belong in Los Angeles, but I love Los Angeles.

In a way, I am doing a good thing. I am bringing L to this city, this polluted, rotten city in desperate need of a cleansing. Of a complete cathartic purging. Los Angeles needs to be attacked and destroyed and rebuilt. I am asking L to do that, because I am busy causing inevitable deaths. I am doing a good thing.

While I muse on my goodness, I have lowered my hands to the girl's face and plunged my fingers into her eye sockets. I hadn't even realized. I laugh a little at the absurdity as I pluck her eyes out of her head. The squelching, tearing sounds are delicious. I inspect the pure milky whiteness of the eyeball. Beautiful. Angelic. I bend over the corpse, feeling a deep bond with the body. Angels, we are both angels: the only angels in the entire poisoned city.

She, an Angel of Innocence, martyred by the cruel twists of fate.

I, an Angel of Death, dutifully serving the purposes that was determined for me before my birth. Fulfilling the tasks that my eyes assign to me.

As I sit up again, letting go of the corpse, and begin to clean myself up, then take disinfectant wipes and set to work around the apartment, I whistle. I am so happy. I am a good man, a man who has discovered his purpose, something that so few people ever do. Oh, what a beautiful thing. I am proud of myself, and before I go, I kneel in front of a small crucifix they have hung on the wall, and I cross myself, and I pray.

When I am done I think, _I've lost my mind_ and I revel in the truth.

* * *

><p>This is entirely an ode to The Catching Light Alchemist's<em> 9 Masks. <em>I hope you don't mind me all but stealing your idea, Alex! I know this particular vignette is very short, but that's because it's got a very specific number of words, if anyone cares to check.


	2. Blindness

ii. Blindness

I take a deep drag of the cigarette. It's difficult sometimes, to smoke and play at the same time. But over the years I've learned how to execute both actions neatly. I have spent hours sitting alone, cross-legged, holding my game with both hands, perfecting the art of breathing with a burning cigarette in between my lips, refusing to let my fingers leave the buttons of the game. I've spent an inordinate amount of time to this end, while my only friend in the world paces up and down the small room, his mind whirring, his mouth shooting out ideas faster than I could ever respond to them. A dull ache starts at the base of my neck, and spreads throughout my head. I cough late at night, until I spit a glob of something dark and unhealthy onto the sheets, and then my eyes start watering until I reach for the pack of smokes and I light up again.

But even that doesn't stop the fidgeting in my fingers, in my bones. My hands need to be holding something. I need to be seeing something, I need a screen in front of my face. I need something I can stare at. Except that I almost cannot see, because in the low of the night, the smoke surrounds my face like a cloud or a screen. But I play anyway. I really have no choice, not when it's been turned on and the glaring light is in my eyes, inviting me to play.

My friend doesn't quite hate it, but he doesn't understand it. You look like a kid, he says to me. A nicotine addicted kid.

Thanks for the psychoanalysis, Doctor Assface, I tell him. Put it on my tab.

Back the fuck off, bitch, he says, but it's not my words that have irritated him. It's not even the fact that I'm playing my games and I'm smoking my cigarettes.

He hates the fact that when he talks to me, I don't look up to respond. I can't look up. I must keep my eyes on the screen, otherwise I will die and I can't have that. I haven't died in a game once in three years and seven months, I've been counting. I can't break that record. I can't look away.

He's right in a big way, though. It does make me look like a kid. It makes me feel like a kid. I never thought I'd say it, but Jesus Christ do I wish I could be back at the House. I wish that I was ten years old again and they were presenting me with a Gameboy, I wish, I wish.

I look at my game, devote myself to the lithe moves of the fingers, to the way that my reflexes have become all but perfect. I take a deep drag of my cigarette to clear my mind. It's easier to play that way. It's easier to play when the smell of smoke clears my head, knocks out any thought of what's going on. It's easier to focus on the game, to drown out Mello's plans with the little muted sounds of my character on his crusade through a virtual reality.

Even when we sit with a man that, three years ago, he would have sent straight to prison, I don't look up. What I don't see is Mello sitting there proudly, thinking he's finally proved himself, he's finally made something worth being out of himself. I play my game and smoke my cigarettes. I don't watch when he talks on the telephone. I have no desire to watch, to see him sell us out. I can be bought and sold and I can sit with the people who do such things, but I cannot, will not, look them in the eye.

The games were initially introduced to train me, to test me. To a certain degree, I still use them like so. I test myself. I train myself to be smarter and better, so that I can better serve the human race, like we were raised to do. The training takes a toll on me. I can have two things and not the third. I choose comfort and I take a drag of my cigarette and play my game, and quietly, in the corner, Mello seals our fate with his plans and all I do is stare blankly at my game. The need to become better makes everything else unimportant. It's not even my fault. The House did this to me.

When I do occasionally look up, everything is shining and constructed just as they are in the games that I play. A virtual reality, an untruth, something so shiningly genius that every inch of it becomes a game, a puzzle. It means nothing. But I have gone three years and seven months without dying, and I shouldn't start now.

I fail to see the reality behind the way that Mello reaches out and clasps my hand a single time before we part, and even as I lie bleeding on the ground, my life quickly ebbing away from me, I close my eyes and the only want I have in the entire world is for a cigarette between my teeth, and I damn myself because I've broken my record and I've just gone and died.

* * *

><p>Blindness: the Second Shelter of the Sinner. Our dear old Matt. Does this make sense?<p> 


	3. Silence

iii. Silence

Sometimes I sit and regret.

I regret my past. I regret my unspoken words. I regret what I reduced my friends to, and I regret the lack of empathy I feel. I regret the loss of a man I once considered a fool. Sometimes I sit, and I can do nothing more but wallow in my own regret.

I once knew a boy very well. His name was not Mello, but that is what they renamed him so that is how I knew him. Even now, his name feels foreign in my mind. I dare not say it aloud. When have I ever said anything aloud? I have kept it locked up in the enigma that is my own brain, which by now, I imagine, is crisscrossed with secrets the same way that blood vessels are splayed out across the pinkish substance within my skull. Crisscrossed and tattooed with secrets that I will never say. If I say them, then the chance that they may be true increases by forty percent. Ten minutes after I say them, that percentage rises to seventy. By the end of a twenty-four hour period, if I say the truths locked up inside my head, then I begin to realize that they are no longer puzzles or lies. If I form the thoughts and regrets into words, then I must accept the truth. This cannot happen.

I sit and I regret, but I save lives. I save millions. I save more than my predecessor and companions ever did. The triumph lingers in my stomach like a burning match. The smoke rises through my stomach and my chest and lingers in my throat, makes it difficult to speak. Nothing matters. I had no desire to speak anyway. I have no desire to speak ever.

I regret the deaths of those whom I may have one day come to appreciate as more than rivals. I take no personal responsibility for this. Mistakes happen. Misjudgements happen, and none of them were mine. The force we were conspiring against was formidable and, to some extent, admirable in his genius. I recognized that. Mello did not. Mello refused to recognize the intelligence of our adversary, and that is what caused his death. His plan succeeded, but with unnecessary death. He was wrong. He was blinded by his emotions, emotions that I had, by then, learned to suppress. I had learned to bury them in my stomach to turn into smoking embers. I had learned to dig them deep into my brain to create the secrets and regrets. I took the emotions that he felt and I chose not to feel them because I did not act on them. Is it not true that emotions do not exist in the physical sense, in the reality that is our earth? They are intangible. They cannot be touched. They do not exist in space. The only way that they can exist is through the actions and words that humans make. On a certain level, all humans must feel emotion. Surely animals feel some level of emotion as well. It is nothing extraordinary. It does not decide the future nor the futures of those around us.

What decides the future, what designates the winner and the loser, what differentiates between a wise man and a loser, is through how they are applied in the physical world. Actions. More commonly, words.

My friend Mello. His words ran away with his mouth. His words made a fool out of him. Again and again. I said nothing, and I became superior. I said nothing, and he saw a superiority that only existed in his own mind. I said nothing, and he suffered. I said nothing, and I came to believe in my own superiority.

I said nothing. My secrets and my regrets turn me cold. He laid out his plan. He doesn't take into account our foe's resourcefulness. I said nothing. He refused to believe that an evil man could be better than he was. And that was his fatal mistake. And I listened but I said nothing. And then he was dead. My own silence led to a misguided belief in my own superiority. Mello never understood. I felt everything that he ever did. But I chose silent safety over vulnerable, bold risk.

I sit here and I regret. I say nothing. I save lives.

But I regret.

* * *

><p>Not sure about this one. What do you think?<p>

(By the way, writing this with the Across the Universe soundtrack in the background is _totally awesome omg._)


	4. Fury

iv. Fury

What I am not is many things. What I am not is a name nor a face nor goals nor intentions nor brains nor emotions nor sadness nor worthlessness and especially not any kind of inferiority, because that is a fucking lie inside of my own head.

What I am is _angry_. I may not be the smartest kid ever to live into his teens but I'm not arrogant or delusional. I can see myself just fine, fuck you very much. I know what I am and I'm not about to lie to myself. But it's been a very long time and I've never been able to make myself not angry, so I think I'm at the point where you stop rejecting yourself and finally start making some fucking progress. I'll use my angry. I'll use my fury and my rage, and I'll tame it like you would a wild beast. Like you would break a stallion. I'll break the angry inside of me and then I'll work just fine. I'll break it into little pieces so that I can rearrange them the way that I want, like a thousand puzzle pieces inside my chest, each one of them burning hot. I'll burn my fingers trying to put it back together again. My fingertips will light on fire, then my hands, then my arms and my shoulders and chest and then my whole body, and when I'm on fire I will be on fucking _fire_ and I'll be like a comet crashing down to earth, or I'll be like a shark darting through the water attacking the stupid poor bastard in my way. I'll be like a lion in the African grasslands, stalking my prey with a quiet sense of fury pumping through my veins. Lions are angry creatures. Have you ever seen a zebra after a lion gets to it? No, you fucking haven't, not in one piece anyway, and that's exactly my point. Lions don't sit on their asses and calculate and coordinate and then take the zebra out with a well-placed, isolated bullet to the neck. Lions _attack_. Lions hit their prey with the force of a thousand tons, or something like that anyway, I read that somewhere once. Lions don't just hit because they're hungry, they attack because their hearts are beating hard and they've gotta hit _something_, you know? Have you ever seen a lion eat? _That's_ how I am. That's what I am. The way they tear things apart with their powerful jaws. The way I will fucking tear that evil murderer apart piece by piece, no matter _what_. That's what I am.

Lions don't just sit there and throw tantrums. Lions don't roar and scream and shout and beat their paws onto the hot, dusty ground in rage. They take the anger they have inside of them, they control it, and they fucking _use it_. _That's_ why I'm like a lion.

Also maybe it's a little bit because I like the idea of that Kira bastard looking like a skinny little gazelle, something I could tear apart with my bare hands. Oh, how I would love to tear him apart. How I would love to take hold of his limbs and rip them from his fucking body. But I can't do that – I couldn't. I may be an angry little bastard, but like I said, I'm not stupid. This is the good kind of angry, though. The angry I can break apart and then put back together because I am _going _to see him torn apart if that's the last thing I do.

This kind of anger turns me calculating, intelligent. Like a sharp pain, like a bee sting or a dagger in the leg or sometimes I think like one right in the heart, like someone suddenly scooping your eye out with a sharp-edged spoon, the tingling sensation of my concentrated fury in my chest helps me to concentrate. It makes me see that to do what I need to do, I need to take a moment and I need to do what my rival won't. Because it's true. I'm not just angry at the idiot who's killing people but I'm a little bit angry at the stupid dumbfuck who I was supposed to work with. I couldn't work with him; sometimes that smarts the most, but I brush that aside.

I'm angry at him. That's the simplicity here. I can't force myself to feel anything but rage crashing through my veins when I see him, when I think of him. I must beat him. I must solve this quicker, faster, I must flip him the biggest bird of them all, a silent scream of fuck-you right to his face. I'm angry. My anger fuels my everything, my entire world, my every choice dictated by the reality that _I must beat him because I hate him_.

I did. With the assistance of several highly illegal actions. Using tactics a detective isn't supposed to think of. Doing everything a criminal would, I did it.

And now I'm sitting here in a truck with a naked woman in the back, and apparently Matt is dead and the last words I said to him were, "Don't fuck this up, asshat," and I'm a little bit sad but mostly I'm pissed off that he'd let this happen. He should've known. It's his fault. I'm so angry that there's really no room for anything else right now, thank God. Can't let that Takada whore see me crying or anything. I'd probably shoot her right in the face if she ever saw that.

I sit there stewing in my anger, helpless, and when the pain clutches my heart at first I swear to myself because I fucking _knew_ the stress of being so damn mad at the world all the time would get to me eventually, but then I realize what's going on, and I die with an ugly, twisted scowl on my face.

* * *

><p>Fury: the Shelter of our Fourth Sinner, everyone's favourite leather-studded drama queen, Mello. What do you think?<p> 


	5. Denial

v. Denial

What do I desire?

Nothing.

I love him.

I love the sharp roll of his eyes he gives when I talk too much. I love the human way he snores when he sleeps, and the god-like way he gives me direction, the way he commands. The authority and power in his voice. I love his voice. I am devoted to his body of flesh and bone and blood and fire and star and cosmos.

I love the way that his touch is love. The way that he anoints me when his fingers brush against my flesh. It gives me shivers down my spine and he doesn't have to say anything. He has bent his back and stooped down to earth to take me with him to a higher plane, to the realm of gods. A realm that exists within himself. He is everything and he has chosen me.

He has chosen _me_. I am his disciple. I am his Magdalene. I am his Virgin. I am only made of human parts but with his blessing I'll be so much more.

What do I desire from him?

Nothing.

He loves me.

He loves me when he whispers words to me on the phone. He loves me when I make mistakes. He loves the unperfect, broken me. He loves me enough to make me better. He loves me enough to make me complete and unbroken and holy.

He owes me nothing. He creates a place for me in his new order. He loves me.

I would love him if he weren't who he is. He would still be my God and my King and my Saviour.

I would still love him and this is what I repeat on nights where he leaves me alone, on nights where I cannot be of use to him.

I would still love him, I tell myself, and I tremble in fear. I am only afraid that my judgement may waver. I am not afraid of him. I am afraid of my love for him. I am afraid of myself.

I would still love him, I repeat.

I would still love him.

I would still love him.

He does not scare me. He loves me. He loves me. I desire nothing.

I love him.

* * *

><p>I know, I <em>know <em>this one's short. I know. And I know it's been a while. This has been sitting in my documents for like months because I didn't think it was good enough to post. But rereading it...this is really how I view Misa. She thrives - no, she _exists_ entirely on denial. And it's not like she doesn't know it. She's an intelligent girl, even if she pretends she isn't.

I have lots of feelings about Misa Amane. But this is actually how I would imagine she thinks. I wonder if anyone agrees?


End file.
